Anyone still using a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has ten days to return their device for a refund before Sammy kills the handset for good.
The South Korean electronics giant says that an over-the-air update set for release on December 19 will effectively brick the devices for good, shutting off all phone and data connections and …

BES, the TLA that has struck trepidation into BOFHs for a decade, is no more. The brand name has been discarded in the biggest rationalisation of the company’s product lines in the company’s history.
BlackBerry's product reorganisation leaves almost no part of its enterprise portfolio untouched. Practically every product that …

Analysis
Some good news has finally fallen the way of Samsung, as the Supreme Court has ruled in favour of the South Korean giant in its ongoing patent spat with Apple - scrapping a $399m damages bill in the latest episode of the hottest legal battle in tech, though certainly not the last.
At the heart of this is the idea that instead …

Western Digital Corp wowed analysts with exec spiel and five – or was it six? – product announcements. We have helium gas-filled drives, a 3D TLC NAND microSD card, two SSDs and a promised furiously fast flash platform array overflowing with IOPS.
We'll start with the rotating rust and an Ultrastar He12, 12TB helium-filled …

Qualcomm says it has started shipping to customers samples of the Centriq 2400, its 10nm 64-bit ARMv8-A general-purpose server-grade system-on-chip.
The mobile chip designer, based in San Diego, California, has recruited engineers from AMD, Intel and Broadcom, as well as tapped its internal pool of techies, to work on the …

Update
Samsung has claimed a Supreme Court victory that will see its $400m patent damages bill to Apple significantly reduced.
The highest court in America ruled that the damages were incorrectly calculated and ordered a Californian district court to take another look at the case to calculate a smaller bill for the South Korean …

Apple's Watch range sold 1.1m units in 2016's third quarter, a stunning 2.9m fewer than the same quarter in 2015.
The dip means Apple's share of the wearables market dipped from 17.5 per cent to 4.9 per cent in a year, representing -71 per cent growth according to abacus-twirler IDC's new Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device …

A teardown analysis of the Samsung Note 7 claims that the ill-fated phablet was doomed by a design flaw that squeezed its battery pack to unsafe pressure levels.
Anna Shedletsky, CEO of engineering software developer Instrumental, said her team's teardown analysis of the Note 7 found that the smartphone's tendency to explode …

+Comment
Micron has introduced a 5100 line of data centre flash drives and promises it will be the highest-density SATA SSD on the market.
There are three models and they all use TLC (3bits/cell) 3D flash and have a 6Gbps SATA interface:
5100 ECO – 480GB, 960GB, 1.9TB, 3.84TB and (coming) 7.86TB
5100 PRO – 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, 3. …

VIDS
Hackers are destroying everything from the latest gaming systems, phones, and even cars with a dangerous circuit-frying USB device that could put critical systems at risk.
The -220V USBKill device developed last year and since refined is an inconspicious USB stick that can ruin devices in seconds by delivering continous power …

Samsung's phone sales have fallen 10 per cent in the last year, but the Note isn't to blame. The analysis comes from market researcher CCS Insight, which says the Korean giant is in decline because it is withdrawing from low-margin volume segments.
Last week Gartner identified a 14.2 per cent fall in share, rather than …

Hands On
Can you believe Huawei’s luck? Imagine discovering a new planet, populated entirely by Irish people, which has a dozen orbiting satellite moons all harvesting shamrocks, all the year round. That lucky.
Through extraordinary timing, the Chinese giant finds itself with the big screen phone category to itself, thanks to its new …

Samsung's top brass will go public tomorrow about ways to beef up shareholder value on the back of continued calls from activist investor Elliott Management's to break up the South Korean business.
Just as the chaebol extinguished one fire – the exploding Galaxy Note 7 recall – yet another has ripped through the boardroom with …

MBBF2016
Mobile operators are quite comfortable with NarrowBand Internet of Things and hope it will funnel more and more IoT customers into their arms – but not all of them understand the market, it seems.
Speaking at last week's Huawei Mobile Broadband Forum, the GSMA's Graham Trickey, the mobile talking shop's "head of connected …

We’re hearing HDS is retiring or downgrading its 11-month-old HFS A-Series all-flash array.
We understand this 60 x 2.5-inch slotter is an OEM’d version of a Raid Inc. box which has 30 side-mounted drives either side of a 2U tray. There are six rows of five stacked SSDs per side. Nimbus Data also uses the hardware in its …

Dell's applied for the US trademarks “Canvas” and “Dell Canvas”, both covering “Interactive touch screen computer interfaces”.
So what's it up to? The Register reckons the most obvious candidate is something to do with its Surface Hub competitor, the model C7017T 70-inch Interactive Conference Room Monitor, as that's the most …

Samsung's beefing up one of the divisions that hasn't been burned by its Galaxy Note 7 disaster, acquiring a US company that specialises in quantum dots for displays.
Under its previous name Color IQ, the takeover target QD Vision was already licensing technology to TV makers like Philips, LG, Sony, and TCL Group in China.
“ …

Falling sales, burning batteries – but not everything associated with smartphones is bad
The market for used phones is exploding by comparison, according to analyst IDC.
IDC predicts that sales of used smartphones will hit 222.6 million units by 2020, a compound annual growth of 22.3 per cent.
The used-phone market will be …

Analysis Wikibon's chief technology guy, David Floyer, has put out his top six disruptive tech tips for 2017, seeing that ARM and Open CAPI will separately grow at Intel's Xeon expense, the cloud at on-premises' Server SAN expense, and flash at disk drive's expense, while XPoint will be a 2017 dud.
Here's his list:
AWS will …

The utter irrelevance of Seagate as an SSD shipper is shown by TrendFocus's estimated total SSD unit ship numbers for 2016's third quarter, with just 0.1 per cent of the 38.25 million units shipped, 46 per cent up on a year ago.
Stifel MD Aaron Rakers has revealed some of the TrendForce numbers. They cover both enterprise and …

Apple is offering iPhone 6s customers free replacement batteries after it emerged phones had been mysteriously shutting down.
The fruity firm said the fault had affected smartphones sold between September and October 2015 within a “limited serial number range”.
“This is not a safety issue,” Apple said in a statement.
Number- …

Qualcomm's been bitten by the bounty bug, signing on with HackerOne to offer up to US$15,000 for vulnerabilities in modems and processors.
The bounty covers Snapdragon 400, 615, 801, 805 808, 810, 820 and 821 processors, and its X5, X7, X12 and X16 LTE modems.
A vulnerability in any one of these would reach a long way into …

Analysis
For the past few weeks, this tech reporter has been tussling with a complex issue: which new laptop to buy.
Just a month ago, this seemed like an exciting proposition: not only was Apple going to update its MacBook Pro line (at last), but Microsoft had gone all Apple on us and come out with some genuinely innovative products. …

Samsung is paying the price for the Galaxy Note 7 disaster. The South Korean giant recorded its largest ever fall in global smartphone market share in Q3, Gartner reckons.
“Samsung’s smartphone sales in the third quarter of 2016 as a whole declined 14.2 per cent year over year — their worst performance ever. Samsung’s previous …

Apple has admitted that the iPhone 6 has “Touch Disease”, a glitch that leaves the handset's touch screen inoperable.
The problem surfaced in August when repair site iFixit diagnosed a problem with controller chips that lost electrical contact with the phablet's motherboard.
Apple, as is its wont, remained silent … until …

Connect 2016
At the Connect event under way in New York, Microsoft laid out its plans for developers targeting its platform – though what the "Microsoft platform" means has changed radically from what it used to be.
The slogan today is "Any developer, any app, any platform," whereas a couple of years ago the theme was "Windows everywhere …

The latest and greatest Snapdragon processor, the 835 due out in the first half of next year, will be made by Samsung and be the first to use the chaebol's 10-nanometer FinFET architecture.
The announcement was made at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Technology Summit in New York and extends the partnership the two firms have had for …

India has just recorded its first-ever 30-million-smartphones-shipped quarter, according to abacus-shuffling firm IDC.
Don't get too excited about that representing a breakthrough and serious momentum towards a wired India, because the firm says “channel preparation for the festive season, mega online sales and early import of …

Microsoft has joined The Linux Foundation as a Platinum member, the highest level of membership. The news was announced at the company's Connect developer event in New York.
The Linux Foundation is a non-profit trade association which supports and promotes the Linux operating system and related projects, including Node.js, Xen …

Facebook and Apple will start buying sports and movie rights. The internet startup bubble will burst. And lots of people will buy a Nokia phone. What do you reckon?
Yes, it’s that time of the year when CCS Insight goes all Nostradamus on us, picking key technology and telecomms trends for the year (and years) ahead. As ever, …

Samsung will throw US$9m at developers willing to have a go at making apps for smartphones running Tizen.
Tizen is now a Linux Foundation project, so enjoys independent oversight and is free to adopt. But that's not helped it to catch on in the smartphone market: Samsung offers a handful of models but hasn't taken them far …

Samsung is splashing out $8bn on buying US connected car tech firm Harman Industries, it announced this morning.
The deal is for $112 in cash per share, a premium of just over a quarter on Harman’s closing share price at the end of last week.
In its first quarter of fiscal year 2017 Harman sold $1.8bn worth of its “connected …

It's not just radio any more: Penn State University boffins have turned up a “fast gamma ray burst” that correlates with a source of a fast radio burst (FRB).
The still-mysterious FRBs have excited astro-boffins ever since 2013.
In 2015, Australian astronomer Emily Petroff pulled off the first real-time observation of an FRB …

Google's new Daydream View VR is knocking out users' phones. Early adopters using the headset with Google's new Pixel phones have told El Reg that the phone shuts down within minutes because of thermal issues.
A Reddit thread echoes the issue, where one user comments:
It's remarkable that any phone is capable of longterm VR …

Power of Community
If Jung Hoon Lee is not the world's best hacker, he can't be far from the top of the dais: the 22 year-old South Korean better known as Lokihardt has an uncanny knack for finding zero-day exploits in the world's most popular and most secure systems.
Lee is a fixture at global hacking competitions like Pwn2Own and PwnFest where …

Comment
It's tempting and all too easy to sneer at Silicon Valley for being out of touch with not just the world but the US as well.
Huge salaries, a high concentration of a single industry and a self-referential culture oblivious to how its ideas could do anything but change mankind don't help either.
The sight of tech's leaders …

Comment
Toblerone's decision to keep its post-Brexit price stable by just selling less chocolate for the same price is a tactic the software industry should copy.
I offer this suggestion because so much software is "bloatware" packed with features hardly anyone uses, but the inclusion of those features is used to justify the price. …

Police in South Korea have raided the corporate offices of Samsung in connection with a high-profile government corruption probe.
The Korea Times reports that police conducted the search on Tuesday at Samsung's headquarters on the suspicion that executives at the company were involved with illegal payments to foundations run …

Almost two years ago The Register predicted that Huawei would become Samsung and Apple's "worst nightmare" and the claim earned plenty of derision*. But it's happening – and faster than anyone expected.
Huawei is now vying with Apple to be the world's No.2 phone maker and is better placed to profit from Samsung's Note 7 woes …

+Comment
Kaminario is building its K2 all-flash array mountain higher in scale, performance and price/performance terms and adding dynamic composability.
It sees problems with software-defined, hyper-converged systems and traditional array-based products because they can't meet the needs of customers that are getting "SaaSified," in …

Samsung has joined the race to build the best AI assistant, which will be available on the Galaxy S8, the company’s flagship mobile phone series.
Rumors of Samsung’s AI assistant started circulating after the South Korean tech giant filed a patent in October for something called “Bixby.”
Bixby is “computer software for …

Samsung says it will recall millions of washing machines that are prone to blowing up.
The South Korean electronics giant says that 34 models of top-loading machines are covered by the massive US-wide recall, which was sparked by hundreds of reports of units violently tearing themselves apart mid-cycle.
According to the US …

IBM has quietly revealed that in “In the second half of 2017” its Bluemix cloud will offer “a broad services suite fuelled by Intel Optane”.'
“Optane” is Intel's official name for 3D Xpoint, its non-volatile memory that's faster than NAND Flash, persistent and therefore a very interesting alternative to both random access …

Android smartphones currently account for nine tenths of what analysts say is now strictly a two-brand market.
Strategy Analytics estimates that over the third quarter of 2016, Android handsets claimed precisely 87.5 per cent of all shipments, the highest market share ever for the Google-backed operating system.
Apple was …

Smart home gizmo maker Nest has announced a range of household appliances that will now work with its thermostat, smoke alarm and camera ecosystem.
A Whirlpool dishwasher, Rheem water heater, Samsung vacuum and Jenn-Air stove, among other things, will now be able to interact intelligently with the smart-home devices in a range …

Pics
Huawei's chance to seize upon Samsung's Note 7 woes has come, with a new phablet and a Porsche Design-branded sibling.
The Mate 9 was unveiled in Munich, Germany, on Thursday, and ushers in EMUI 5, a user-interface skin more familiar to European and US punters. The handset runs Google's Android 7. Huawei has also introduced a …

It sounds like a big number, but the 43 million tablets that shipped in Q3 2016 are a disaster for vendors, according to prognosticator IDC.
The overall market declined 14.3 per cent year-on-year, the analyst house says, dragged down by poor sales at the top end of the market, with consumers switching to cheapies.
There's a …